An interesting new book (“The Golden Passport” by
Duff McDonald) makes the case that HBS bears responsibility for many of
corporate America’s ills. The following Newsweek piece provides a great review of
how corporate America evolved over the past four decades:
“By the late 1970s,
after nearly three-quarters of a century of existence, Harvard Business School
had carved out a nice little niche in the management universe. It had proved
itself a dependable supplier of prescreened and highly motivated graduates to
big business. HBS was still a dependable supplier of highly motivated graduates
in the 1980s, but they weren’t going to big business anymore. They were headed
to Wall Street and consulting. HBS also continued to put a high gloss on the
management myth of the day, but those myths were increasingly finance-related,
in particular the merits of shareholder capitalism. And it continued to deliver
pseudo-intellectual capital that practitioners could use to justify their
decisions. In the 1980s, HBS had abandoned its mission of trying to educate an
enlightened managerial class. Instead, it threw its lot in with Wall Street as
it was dismantling the edifice of American industry HBS had helped build. HBS
had nurtured the professional manager from his birth and then helped to kill
him.”
Related:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-business-school-boondoggle-1492809680